I am not much clear with the "Cross Platform Apps." Can we really built up some apps which can run on iPhone/iPad , Android Phones/Tabs , Blackberry , Nokia (Any platform or more than one platform at least) ?
I have heard something like WAC , Titanium but really not clear with all these. Please help me out.
There are some good frameworks out there to build cross-platform mobile applications:
Titanium: It is a framework to build Android, IPhone (and BlackBerry, still in beta it seems) using javascript, that will compile to native applications for the platforms specified.
Rhodes: A ruby framework, that supports almost all the mobile platforms out there (recently they added support to WP7). It has an MVC structure, and can use RhoSync to synchronize the data to a server side application.
PhoneGap: Another javascript framework, but it supports more platforms than Titanium, because it doesn't compile to native applications, but it embeds a web application inside a native application (web apps/web views are supported in each platform, so it's easier to handle the portability this way).
The apps will have access to the hardware, like the camera/gps, through some generic apis.
In some case you can build specific native module to integrate them in just one application platform if you need to.
These frameworks are useful to build cross-platform application writing just one application, without having to write each single application with the platforms sdks.
They have some (or many) limitations. If your application are simple enough you can consider using one of those framework. But for more complex ones, sometimes, if you target only a couple of plaforms, it could take less time to build each one with native sdks individually than using one of this cross-platform framework, because of their limitations (I highly prefer using the Android SDK than using Titanium).
Related
I'm about to work on developing an application on tablets (Android/iPad).
Our clients ask us to make it cross platform unless there is any reason to stick to one.
I've looked at some posts related to cross-platform iOS/Android development here, but I'm still not sure if I should just develop a native application on a specific platform or I should try to make it cross-platform.
I'm new to developing applications on mobile devices.
If you can provide any advice/experience, that would be great!
As far as I know, for technical reasons, the trade-offs are as follows:
Native applications are faster, but it's not easy to reuse the codes on other platforms.
Cross-platform solutions using web-based applications (e.g. PhoneGap) have slower performance, limited access to OS and hardware APIs, web-like user interface.
Cross-platform solutions like Appcelerator Titanium compile the codes to native codes but I'm not sure about its limitation (if I have to change it back to native application after developing for three months, I'll cry!) and it costs money.
Also, for time/effort needed to develop a native application or cross-platform application on tablets, in general, is it easier and more reliable to develop/maintain a native application than a cross-platform solution?
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance! :)
Personally I would stick with native apps. I'm working for a company that wants to create apps for multiple platforms as well and they have been looking for alternatives to native development, such as Titanium and PhoneGap. We've chosen for the following approach:
I've been hired to develop the iPhone app.
Some students for a University will probably work on the Android version, where the data framework / layer will look and work somewhat the same as my Objective-C code, e.g.:
-getFlightInfoWithId:forUserId: will become something like (void)getFlightInfo(flightId, userId) in Java.
The view and controller layers will probably differ in huge ways, mostly because Android and iOS devices have different GUI guidelines and capabilities (e.g. Android screen sizes can differ a lot, whereas on iOS there are only 2 real options).
For other smaller platforms we'll be offering a HTML5 app. To me native apps are always preferable to apps created with cross-platform toolsets as generally native apps should perform better, should have a better 'feeling' and might have some more capabilities, e.g. might be able to use some hardware features that are native to the platform and unavailable in a cross-platform toolset.
The bad news is that unless you're planning on writing a web, then you're going to have to write two versions.
The good news is that you can share the assets between them.
I guess you write could write large chunks of your iPad version in C, then compile it for Android via the NDK, but then there's all the UI stuff and so it's still gonna be two versions.
We have an line-of-business app that runs on Windows Mobile. It's a Winforms app with a local SQL CE database and gets its data from a WCF Web Service running on the server.
Now customers are always asking "why don't you make a version for iPhone/iPad/Android/Phone 7 etc". My boss asked how hard this would be. My initial answer is very hard especially since I would probably be the only person doing the work. I don't have any experience outside my Visual Studio happy place.
Now I've come across MonoTouch and MonoDroid. They appears to offer an easy solution but I'm sure there are lots of issues. I doubt that I will be able to just compile my app for Android.
I'm inclined to suggest that it would be far too much work and that the only realistic solution is a mobile web site with several versions of each page for different screen resolutions. Unfortunately the existing app has a local database and is "sometimes connected" so that won't cut it.
Any suggestions and tips before I waste a huge amount of time?
Cheers
Mark
I doubt that I will be able to just compile my app for Android
That is correct; you won't.
So, background: the design philosophy of MonoTouch and Mono for Android is to bring the "core" .NET and C# experience to iOS and Android while also exposing the underlying features of each specific platform. Whereas PhoneGap and Titanium abstract the underlying platform (for a "write-once, run-anywhere" vibe), MonoTouch and Mono for Android provide no platform abstractions and directly expose the underlying platform types and members.
The result is that MonoTouch programs use MonoTouch.UIKit.UIButton, which directly wraps the underlying CocoaTouch UIButton type.
Similarly, Mono for Android programs would use Android.App.Activity, which directly wraps the underlying Android android.app.Activity type.
Common across both platforms are the "core" framework namespaces and types which you find on .NET, .NET CF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, and Mono: System, System.Collections.Generic, System.Linq (yes, Linq-to-Objects), System.Xml.Linq (yes, Linq-to-XML), System.IO, etc., etc. For example, see the assemblies included in Mono for Android.
So, can you use your existing Windows Mobile app as-is on Android? No, because Mono for Android doesn't provide System.Windows.Forms.
However, it should be possible for you to refactor your existing code to follow a Model/View/Controller design pattern (or MVVM, or...), abstracting away the UI (View) so that you can replace it for various platforms, e.g. an iOS UI with MonoTouch, a WP7 UI with XAML, an Android UI with Mono for Android, an HTML UI with ASP.NET MVC, etc., etc. You won't get a "write once, run anywhere" experience, but you will be able to provide the user with native user interfaces which are consistent with their chosen platform.
For example, see the MIX11 Conference Apps, which utilize a common code base while providing platform-specific UIs for iOS, Android, and WP7.
look at titanium and phonegap.
My suggestion is to have a quick look at WP7. It's quite easy to jump in to, even more so if you have Visual Studio (which you do) and C# experience of any sorts. Then you should be able to more easily guesstimate how long it would take you to develop a C# application (and possibly port that to Android using MonoDroid).
And yes, Titanium & PhoneGap are options, but I personally think MonoDroid looks better.
What platform are you getting the most requests for? I am guessing Android, as that seems the most likely. I have seen a lot of people saying MonoDroid is really solid.
Is there a sane way to develop a cross platform Mobile app? We want these to be native apps on each platform, and not necessarily some kind of web page.
Currently we're thinking to split it into two languages:
C# backend (business logic)
--> Standard C# app for WP7
--> App built on MonoTouch for iPhone/iPad/etc.
Java backend (business logic)
--> Standard Android Java app (MonoDroid version of C# not ready
yet)
--> Standard Blackberry Java app
We could also develop initially in C# and use one of the conversion tools out there to get our C# converted into Java as a starting point.
Is there another approach? Our skillsets include mainly include a strong C# .Net background, and minor Java experience.
We don't really want to go low level and use something like C/C++ to get the job done. These are usually going to be simple LOB applications that communicate to some web service.
Side Question: how do game devs like the makers of Angry Birds do it?
UPDATE:
MonoDroid is now officially released. So it seems you would only need to use Java for the BlackBerry. We are considering not developing for BlackBerry at all, because developing for the other 3 platforms has been simplified. There is definitely some cost involved, as MonoTouch and MonoDroid are both $399 and you would also need a license for Visual Studio (this doesn't include cost for App store, etc.).
There's no good simple answer that I know of for all mobile platforms. You can use development environments like Appcelerator Titanium, which cross-compile to native code on various platforms (right now, for instance, I think Titanium supports iOS and Android, with plans for Blackberry). However, these usually have a limited API that you have access to, and you still end up needing to design different UIs for the different platforms (in my commercial work, I have never successfully used such a platform)
You could also design all the business logic in a web-services back end, and then just write "thin client" apps for each platform. This works, but of course requires network access when the end user wants to use your app. (Usually it'll be there, but sometimes may not)
Ultimately, I usually end up doing what you propose -- writing the basic business logic in a couple of different languages as generically as possible, and then bundling that in with custom UI/device code for each platform. Haven't found a better way myself....
(BTW, I believe games like Angry Birds are written largely in OpenGL and then loaded onto the OpenGL processor on each platform. But I could be mistaken...)
Those are some great answers. I agree, x-platform development is still very primitive. I'd like to add 2 points:
1) You do not need to write your backend in different languages. Choose one language (based on your comfort level, performance etc. criteria) and then connect from your platform-specific apps directly to the backend. If your backend is server-side code, one way of talking to it would be via XmlHttpClient. If it's a piece of native code common across various apps and is written in say C++, you can use JNI from Java and wrapper assembly from C#.
2) Another reason for avoiding x-platform tools is that you'd always need to wait for them to support the new APIs released by the platform vendor (Apple, Google, MSFT etc.). Once these companies release new APIs, the tools will need to be updated and only then will you be able to use the new APIs.
I don't think this is (easily) possible, if you're not using some HTML5 (jquerymobile etc.) in a WebView in your own app (looks like a real app, but still you will somehow see that it's not) instead of the normal browser. You can still use some native API from the device (accelerometer,...).
There are (commercial) platforms like Sybase Unwired Platform that help you in generating some client code. Afaik for Blackberry and Windows Mobile even some UI can be generated out of the business objects on the server. But to me it sounds that this might be too heavy-weight for your case.
Regards,
Martin
Issue
What is your strategy for building a desktop-like webapp that needs to be deployed to desktop web browsers and on mobile devices(Android, IPhone, etc)?
A course of action could be to firstly select the best framework for building the part that runs on computers(i.e. not mobile devices). Being a desktop-like app, a good candidate framework is GWT+ExtGWT since it provides:
Java-based development which is much scalable/solid than developing in Javascript via ExtJS for example
Good debugging
Good testability
Next, you'd want to deploy this app on mobile devices too. So how do you go from here? Write a separate implementation(separate from GWT) for Android, another one for iOS(in objective-c), another one for Windows Mobile, and so on?
Related
Related to above, I saw the presentation of PhoneGap which claims you develop in Javascript+HTML and it generates code for all mobile platforms: Android, iOS, etc.
However, PhoneGap is not an option since I don't think it integrates well with GWT and more important, it doesn't generate a native app which can take advantage of features like backgrounding, services, etc(see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHXn3Kg2IQE for why native Android apps are much better than browser-based ones). There may be other frameworks like PhoneGap out there that I'm not aware of though but at this point I only see:
one implementation with GWT
one implementation for Android
one implementation for IPhone
and so on ...
If you are already planning on developing for multiple platforms, it is a good idea to at least consider cross platform frameworks like PhoneGap or Appcelerator. Beyond the fact that you are developing for multiple platforms there are a couple of other important questions to consider.
Do you want a web version as well?
Do you need intensive graphics support?
Do you have loads of money to target multiple platforms?
Do you have loads of time to target multiple platforms?
You also point out two more great questions to consider in debugging and testability. In terms of unit testing, any native platform is very difficult to unit test. Debugging is pretty easy for most native platforms.
Regarding PhoneGap, it is important to know a few things about it.
You can write PhoneGap plugins. A plugin is essentially native code for any given platform that can do pretty much anything you would want to do in native code -- background services, opengl, etc -- and make it accessible to JavaScript in the web view.
There are several open source projects that you might be very interested in such as GWT-PhoneGap, QUnit for JavaScript unit testing, and Weinre for Firebug like debugging.
Hope that helps!
Recently we are going to develop some products on mobile phone (specially for 3g). There are many platforms about mobile phones: iPhone OS, Symbian, Blackberry's. If I want to develop a product, should I use Java or write every program for the main platforms?
Particular one question for iPhone development: are there many Java programs on iPhone? Most iphone app I've seen are developed by their own xCode.
I need some guidance on how to do coding for mobiles correctly.
All these platforms are completely different beasts as in the old days. About symbian, (which I am most familiar with) you can use Qt for quality native applications. Native api is confusing so avoid it where possible. If your application is simple, you can even get away with python.
In short, use the language which you are most productive available for each platform. Their apis are wildly different anyway. Language choice doesn't matter as much as the choice of platforms you are supporting.
Java is not available for use on the iPhone; you can use Objective-C, C and C++ to develop iPhone applications.
There is currently no Java for iPhone, so you need to develop separately for iPhone in objective C.
Alternatively you can create application which runs in web browser, it'll be available on all platforms, but not every application is suitable for web.
Have you considered you using web technologies?
There are a couple of cross platform tool kits for iPhone and Android. They work in the same fashion as Adobe Air. Allowing you to make HTML/JS based web app and run it as native code in the browser.
Titanium Mobile (Android & iPhone) HTML/CSS/JS
Corona iPhone Only via Lua
Palm's Web OS is also based on web technologies.
Finally the old guard, Symbian Provides a Web Widgets system, that works in on all handsets with 9.2 fp 2 installed (n95,e72, n97 etc.) The api supports some hardware functionality.
The only one left out in the cold is Windows Mobile. There is some 3rd party support in the form of Web Widgets by torch mobile
It's currently limited to iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android (and possibly WinMo) but you may want to check out the open source project called PhoneGap. I think it is basically just a native wrapper around the built in web browser for each device, but it does expose some functionality not normally available in that environment such as geolocation, accelerometer, sound, etc.